One-Man ‘Parole Boards’ Battle Prison Crowding

J. Michael Keating pulls into town and goes directly to jail.

There he becomes both judge and jury, an all-powerful ruler of a rat-infested roost--part politician, part warden, part social worker.

Keating is a special master, one of at least six around the nation. They are usually lawyers with corrections experience called in by federal judges after a court ruling demands improved prison conditions. That often means releasing hundreds of inmates before their time, a task that makes him one of the most powerful--and most despised--bureaucrats in the country.

Two years ago, when Keating began his work in Massachusetts, he had just one job: reduce the population at the Dedham House of Correction to 206, and let everyone else out.

“I was really troubled by it,” he said. “I served the function of parole board, except there was no supervision for these guys.”

The burly, slightly disheveled Keating, 52, started representing inmates while he was still attending Georgetown Law School. Later, he worked as a consultant to the federal Justice Department, helping the government set up neighborhood mediation centers to deal with petty criminals.

So he thought he was prepared in 1978 when U.S. District Judge Raymond Pettine asked him to clean up Rhode Island’s state prison. He was wrong.

“It was just the most mind-blowing thing I’d ever seen in my life,” Keating said, recalling the sweltering prison strewn with garbage that literally pulsated with rats.

First, he fired the warden, a horticulturist by trade. Then he lobbied the Legislature for money to build more jail space, something virtually every jurisdiction needs.

At Dedham, Keating has released 1,242 in two years, including one man who was charged with murder shortly after being sent to another jurisdiction. Keating also once presided over the release of 541 detainees onto the streets one Friday night in Atlanta.

During three days in mid-1989, Keating and other officials released 200 offenders from the Houston jail. Each day, Sheriff John Klevenhagen held the pack of 50 to 70 inmates until 6 p.m. so television cameras could capture the mass exodus.

“He’d open up the gate and it looked like thousands of people, most of whom were not really the most attractive folk in the world, giving the finger to the camera,” Keating said. “It looked like the hordes from some pirate ship were being let loose on the city.”

Most judges give masters carte blanche, which, in addition to releases, also means overseeing new jail construction, offering tips for improving meals or developing an exercise program for inmates.

The demand for their services seems to grow with the prison population.

Nationwide, federal, state and local prisons held 802,428 people as of Jan. 1, 1991, said Helen Butler, a spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Prison Population Statistics. That means on average, prisons across the country held 25% more than capacity, she said. Massachusetts’ prison population was 97.9% over capacity.

“I don’t know of any other area . . . where we spend so much damn money for so little payoff--and tolerate it,” Keating said.

Yet even officials who might agree that prisons are overcrowded resent Keating’s power. Tensions rise almost as soon as a local judge hears a master has been called to town. One Massachusetts Superior Court judge, Roger Donahue, refuses to send people convicted in his court to a jail overseen by a master.

“There is absolutely no right for a federal judge or a federal master to reduce a state judge’s sentence,” Donahue said. “And yet that’s precisely what’s happening.”

Plymouth County Sheriff Peter Flynn decided to go to court rather than release even one inmate one day early. For more than a year, county lawyers and attorneys from a prominent Boston law firm have battled over Flynn’s double-bunking in the 300-bed jail near Cape Cod.

“I don’t feel we should be putting people back on the streets that the commonwealth feels should be locked up,” he said.

Inmates, meanwhile, play their own political games, frequently lobbying the masters by mail. Keating smiled, remembering some of their entreaties.

“I’m misunderstood,” he laughed, quoting the most popular refrain. “Or they’ve got a grandmother who is very sick.”

In Texas, savvy criminals opt for a five-year sentence over probation, knowing they will be given early prison release in an average of six months with no supervision after that.

“I would suspect that calculation is being made more frequently in jurisdictions around the country,” Keating said.

He refuses to say how he decides whom to release, calling the process confidential. He insists, however, that he never releases inmates he considers violent or a threat to society.

Those who know the masters know that it is not easy work.

“There’s nothing very appealing to being concerned about rapists, murderers, burglars and arsonists,” said Pettine, the energetic reformer who first appointed Keating in Rhode Island.

Keating said much of the overcrowding in U.S. prisons comes from mandatory jail terms for most drug offenses. In the late 1970s, between 3% and 4% of all prisoners were doing time for drug-related crimes; today, it’s between 35% and 40%.

“Whatever we’re doing for the war on drugs, we are taking a hell of a lot of prisoners,” Keating said. “We have five times as many people in jail in Rhode Island as we had 12 years ago.

“Do we feel five times safer than we did 12 years ago? I doubt it.”